Blog Traffic: 6 Ways to Boost Visits & Get Lasting Results

SEO plays a huge role of the success of your blog. For starters, it’s not enough to create a well-written post of your recent study and share the link on Facebook or Twitter. You need to go the extra mile. Otherwise, you’re just creating content for the sake of creating content.

In this post, I want to share with you my actionable tips on how to improve your blog traffic in a month and without spending money on tools, ads and promotions. I will go deeper on each tip so you can see where you might be missing out. I will also share my content ideas, communities I promote my own blog, the structure of an optimized blog post and more.

Think Evergreen

You know what works best hand in hand? Content & SEO. Having content that is interesting, timeless and always stays fresh helps a lot in ranking for keywords and getting consistent organic traffic. I’m talking about evergreen content. Digital agencies that offer content & SEO services can definitely benefit from this tactic. In the graph above, you’ll see the difference between a Time Critical Content and an Evergreen Content. To give you an idea on what evergreen content is, here are some example article titles:

Ultimate Guides – “Ultimate Guide to the Content Marketing”

Lists – “ Top 50 Social Media Influencers to Follow”

Resource Content – “100 SEO Blogs And Websites to Bookmark Now”

How To’s – “How to Start a Conversion-Driven SEO Campaign”

Examples of Time Critical Content:

Statistics – “Social Media Statistics to Know About in 2018”

Events – “What I learned from SEMCon 2013”

Since this type of content requires a lot of research and promotion time, publishing twice a month is enough. Here’s a sample article that is considered evergreen content: The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing

Target Long Tail Keywords

What are long tail keywords? These are three or more keyword phrases which are specific to what you are targeting. Example, if you’re targeting the keyword “visit Philippines”, you can expand it for a longer keyword phrase like “places to visit in the Philippines”. This keyword alone has an average of 1,300 people searching for it every month. Remember, most long tail keywords are less competitive, and are easier to rank for.

To generate & check for long tail keywords, you can use the following FREE tools:

More Photos (and Videos)

Some might not agree that bounce rate is a ranking factor for Google, but according to Brian Dean of Backlinko, it may be a way for Google to use it as a website quality tester. You know, when people quickly leaves your website/blog, it’s probably not good. This is where visual content (photos & videos) can help. Based on Hubspot’s research, viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them & 40% of people will respond better to visual content than plain text.

It has always been a habit for bloggers to include photos (sometimes videos) on each of their post. No reason to stop this, just make sure you do the following:

Add more than two photos. Having more photos means lower chance for users to leave your blog immediately

Use GIFs. GIFs will load faster than videos and people will most likely look at a live image longer than a static one

Add alt text on each image describing the photo itself. Google doesn’t have a way to determine what your photo is about unless you put an alt text on it

If you’re using WordPress, use this plugin to resize and compress your images. You can also use Tiny JPG for a fast and easy image compression.

What Your Blogpost Should Look Like

Given that you have a really great content, your blog should still have all the elements necessary to make it more readable & engaging. I’m talking about the following:

Social media share buttons

Photos (explained above)

Optimized Title

Optimized H1

Comment section

Author Bio (side or bottom of the page)

Join Social Media Communities

As I’ve mentioned on my introduction, promoting your post doesn’t stop after sharing it on Facebook or Twitter. You need to widen your reach so more people can see it. Join groups on Facebook, communities on Google+, LinkedIn Groups, Q&A sites and content sharing sites.

For Facebook Groups, do a quick search of your keyword in the search bar. Most of the time, you’ll get a list of related groups in your niche.

PROTIP: There are some groups with weekly promotional roundups. Take advantage of that to increase your likes, shares & even comments to your blog.

For LinkedIn Groups, same thing, do a quick search of your keyword and you’ll immediately find related groups.

I personally created a spreadsheet where I track my social shares, communities I share my recent articles, email list, links to where I drop blog comments, etc. If you’re planning to blog for a long time, I suggest creating your own tracker as well.

Guest Posting

Links are important to increase your blog’s visibility on search engines. One way to get links without spending a dime is guest posting. I strongly suggest doing this especially if you have a blog. Some of its benefits are:

Improved rankings for your target keywords on search engines

Additional presence for the author and the blog

Additional referral traffic

To start, look for resources first. I manually search Google using the search parameters below to find websites that accept guest posts:

Now that you have a list, think of topics that are close to the style and tone of the guest posting blogs. I usually read a few posts in the blog just to determine if my topics should be technical or not. These usually works. Pitch the topics and wait for the response. If approved, then go ahead and write the content.

While writing the content, don’t forget to include a link to your blog.

PRO TIP: If you happen to have a post related to the content you’re writing, find a place inside the content where you can insert a link to the post. A contextual link sends a stronger ranking signal to search engines.

Create an author bio with a photo and 2-3 sentences describing what you do. Almost all guest posting sites have guidelines so make sure you check them out. You’ll be fine as long as you follow each of them.

Note that the tips above are free and can be implemented on any niche aside from digital marketing. If you have any SEO questions, feel free to hit me up on the comment section.